Posted
by
Soulskill
on Saturday March 16, 2013 @10:26AM
from the watch-your-life-on-youtube dept.

An anonymous reader writes "An article at TechCrunch bemoans the naysayers of ubiquitous video camera headsets, which seems like a near-term certainty whether it comes in the form of Google Glass or a similar product. The author points out, rightly, that surveillance cameras are already everywhere, and increasingly sophisticated government drones and satellites mean you're probably on camera more than you think already. 'But there's something about being caught on video, not by some impersonal machine but by another human being, that sticks in people's craws and makes them go irrationally berserk.' However, he also seems happy to trade privacy for security, which may not be palatable to others. He references a time he was mugged in Mexico as well as a desire to keep an eye on abuses of authority from police and others. 'If pervasive, ubiquitous networked cameras ultimately make public privacy impossible, which seems likely, then at least we can balance the scales by ensuring that we have two-way transparency between the powerful and the powerless.'"

"ubiquitous cameras everywhere recording everything at all times" is already happening and it has nothing to do with Google Glasses.

If you care about your privacy, Glass is the least of your concerns - there are already many ways to record everything secretly. And, if you want to invade people's privacy like this, Glass is the last thing you should use since it is so conspicuous.

Britain already went through this debate as they installed their ubiquitous CCVC network. Privacy lost.

it will just be a transition.soon enough waving your dick around on a video that's on the internet will not matter one bit.

basically, when there's embarrassing shit about everyone on the net it will not matter one bit. however, it might be bad for your business if you're caught bullshitting every day. but uh, I can't see that as too bad to be honest. cops, robbers, mcdonalds employees, teachers and public servants would at least be expecting to get fucked over if they try to fuck over their clientele.

point I'm trying to get at.. is that there's still a lot of behavioral tabus in the west - which leads to hypocrisy.

Well, may be so, however, I still won't tolerate you coming to my home, to my gym, to my office, to my restaurant, to my pub, etc. wearing a camera. You can choose to loose your privacy somewhere else.

You own a gym, office, restaurant and a pub? Lucky you. Let me rephrase it for you, if this becomes popular as your all-purpose device like the smart phone that people use for all sorts of things and expect to be able to use anywhere they go then society will change. I think 20 years ago it was unthinkable that everybody would carry a "spy camera" everywhere they go, now it's completely normal. If you refuse to be in the same place as Google Glass, you'll be the one asked to leave.

But what could possibly be bad about random strangers walking around with cameras attached to their heads which take pictures and instantly upload them to google? Google is building a security camera network made of meat.

You are not arguing against tech like google glass, you are arguing against a fascist police state. If the government, law, and courts are not set up to be abused by the rich then taking pictures in public cannot be used as a weapon.

To me that is the sad thing, Orwell didn't need "big brother" as all that was needed to get the people to go to 24/7 surveillance is social networking crap like FB. Now you have people tweeting every second of the day what they are doing [penny-arcade.com], taking video and pictures everywhere, hell the only thing that keeps it from being big brother heaven is there is so much info overload the feds would need 30 Blue Gene supercomputers just to process all the info!

To me the only interesting thing to come of this will be to see how the courts react, after all you have cops being more jackbooted than ever and busting people for filming them while you have this explosion of video equipment so it will be interesting to see which will trump in the courts. One thing is for sure the days of authority (or anybody for that matter) being able to pull shit in public without anybody filming is well and truly over, I've seen everything from cops beating the helpless in FLA to tank battles in Libya and the one thing they ALL have in common is dozens of people holding up camera phones to get the shot. In fact I would argue that will probably be the defining image of this decade, the image of dozens of people holding up smartphones recording events.

The problem is not "people" recording as much as images sent to Google'a servers.

Well, no - both are problems. I don't want random individuals recording my interactions with them.

Google IS the bigger problem, admittedly. For one thing I'm pretty sure they never truly delete anything even if you delete it from your account. I've come to believe that because of an experience I recently had. One of our users had uploaded an ical file containing her calendar from another system. She then changed her mind and cleared the calendar of everything, following Google's instructions (I verified this) - so the calendar was completely empty. a couple months later, for collaboration's sake she went to her old system and again exported an ical file. Google would not allow her to upload the events, though, stating "these items have already been uploaded" even though they were not on her Google calendar anymore.

FYI the solution to the upload problem was changing the sequence number for each event in the ical file, as others around the web have found.